The fantastical films of French director Albert Lamorisse often limn the boundaries between the earthly and the sublime, with his characters trying to flee or transcend the physical limitations and demands of the material world through flight or the spiritual world of the imagination. In his most famous film, the Palme d’Or-winning short The Red Balloon, Lamorisse presents this dichotomy in a most elemental fashion, with his camera following a young boy, Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse), as he traipses about Paris with a balloon that appears to have a mind of its own.
There’s a consistent levity to the film as both boy and balloon engage in various sorts of play as they wander aimlessly about town. Yet their frivolity is met with resistance from a world that devalues the importance of joy and imagination, both through adults that won’t let Pascal inside places with his balloon and...
There’s a consistent levity to the film as both boy and balloon engage in various sorts of play as they wander aimlessly about town. Yet their frivolity is met with resistance from a world that devalues the importance of joy and imagination, both through adults that won’t let Pascal inside places with his balloon and...
- 12/22/2023
- by Derek Smith
- Slant Magazine
Of all the cinéma de papa stylists so despised by the nouvelle vague, René Clair stands alone as the sole member of the old guard to stand down in the face of critical opposition. Or so it seems: Les fêtes galantes (1965) was his last film.
While Carné and the rest struggled on, defiantly filming when they could, Clair apparently had no stomach for the fight: if people thought he was old-fashioned, maybe he should stop.
One doesn't have to hate Clair with the ferocity that Truffaut could muster in order to see some sad wisdom in this retirement: for some time, Clair's films had been a little stiff. His early days among the surrealists, when he could make a kinetic exercise in visual absurdity like Entr'acte (1924), were long gone, and the vein of absurdist fantasy that enlivened his earliest narrative movies had its last expression in 1952's Les belles de nuit,...
While Carné and the rest struggled on, defiantly filming when they could, Clair apparently had no stomach for the fight: if people thought he was old-fashioned, maybe he should stop.
One doesn't have to hate Clair with the ferocity that Truffaut could muster in order to see some sad wisdom in this retirement: for some time, Clair's films had been a little stiff. His early days among the surrealists, when he could make a kinetic exercise in visual absurdity like Entr'acte (1924), were long gone, and the vein of absurdist fantasy that enlivened his earliest narrative movies had its last expression in 1952's Les belles de nuit,...
- 7/11/2013
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
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